Travels with Myself and Another (4 page)

We left Hongkong at 4.30 a.m. in a high wind in a DC2; freight, seven Chinese passengers, me and Roy Leonard. I cannot remember a radio operator nor find mention of him in my muddled old pencil notes; there was certainly no copilot or stewardess. In principle every plane did carry a radio operator whose job was to pick up weather reports and, before landing, make sure the landing field was not being bombed or under water. The passengers were given a rough brown blanket and a brown paper bag for throwing up. The plane was not heated or pressurized.

We climbed, as if climbing a spiral staircase, in tight jolting circles over Hongkong until we reached fourteen thousand feet. All lights went off except the dim light in the pilot’s cabin and we crossed the Japanese lines, brightly lit far below. In half an hour, the storm hit us. I had been watching the flickering exhaust flame on a wing, but the wing vanished into cloud that looked grainy and hard as granite. Hail sounded like a threshing machine. Everything froze including the air speed indicator. Roy explained that if the speed dropped below sixty-three miles per hour the plane stalled and went into a spin, but there was no cause for anxiety; he opened his window a crack and judged air speed that way; he’d done it often. The wind-screen was a sheet of frost. Inside this cloud mass, elevator draughts lifted and dropped the plane, one’s stomach making the same vertical movements. I had untroubled confidence in Roy so the behaviour of the plane didn’t disturb me but I was perishing of cold. Behind in the cabin, the passengers vomited or hid beneath their blankets from the sound and the fury. This lasted for an hour and a half, after which Roy remarked that the rest of the trip would be easy. We were still flying blind in cloud but I thought it would be bad manners to mention that.

We landed at 10 a.m. at Chungking. The airstrip was a narrow island in the Yangtze, beneath the cliffs. For two months a year, this island lay under sixty feet of water and was subject to weird nightly rises in the river level. When we circled to land, I saw Chungking on the cliff top, looking like a greyish brown expanse of rubble. The passengers departed gratefully. While the plane was refuelled, Roy and I sat on the damp ground and ate a sumptuous breakfast of one bowl of dry rice and tea. That was the only nourishment until we got the same repast in the late afternoon at Kunming. I said there was no nonsense about comfort.

More passengers arrived and we took off for Kunming. The country was visible all afternoon, mountains, changing in colour and marked with a jigsaw pattern of small cultivated fields. A few grey villages, a few isolated farmhouses appeared in this vastness, and paths like animal tracks. Roy flew the plane as if riding a horse, meandering along valleys, “I go where I’m looking,” he said. He was trying out a new route, the idea being to baffle the Japanese.

At one point I observed that this was a remarkable plane as it seemed able to stand still in the air. We were low in a valley between massive mountains. Roy said we weren’t exactly standing still but headwinds were sixty miles per hour so it kind of slowed us. Then he started to play an odd game of peek-a-boo, flying up to peer over mountains, dropping back; he was trying to see how things were at Kunming. “Yep,” he said, and we flew straight in to land. The sky above Kunming was smoky and yellow with dust but clear of Japanese planes; the day’s bombing had finished. Every day, ground crews scurried around shifting the runway markers, white-painted oil drums, and filling in new bomb craters to get ready for the arrival of the CNAC plane.

Again passengers left with relief and another lot arrived and we were off, flying at thirteen thousand feet above the gorges of the Burma Road. The high altitude was necessary because here the appalling down-draughts plunged the plane thousands of feet in seconds towards the valley floor. We were always cold to frozen but I began to feel ashamed (soft, nothing worse than being soft) because I was also flushed and my legs and arms twitched and my mind seemed peevishly dislocated and I thought with horror that I might burst into tears for no reason. Confessing some of these symptoms to Roy, with a forced laugh, he said it was only lack of oxygen and I’d be all right when we got to Lashio after ten that night. Flare pots lit the runway at Lashio; it was much easier on the nerves to land in the dark when you couldn’t see what a mess you were landing on. Sixteen hours and 1,494 miles, if flying like a crow, seemed to me a fairly mammoth trip, but this was a regular weekly run for Roy and the other pilots.

The CNAC rest house, near the Lashio field, was a wooden shack with iron cots and a shower, heaven itself, a chance to wash and sleep in spite of suffocating heat. Roy went off in the early morning with a .22 rifle to bag game; I wandered in the village bazaar, Burma rubies and eggs in banana-leaf baskets and pretty little Burmese women bathing under a tap. The Japanese usually bombed Kunming between 10 and 11 a.m. but it was unsafe to count on their schedule. Today they were late. We hung about sweating, which made a nice change, until the radio reported that twenty-seven Jap planes had bombed Kunming at 1 p.m. for half an hour but were now gone, so we could take off. Back as we’d come, over the Burma Road by daylight, beautiful, hopeless country, jagged mountain after mountain and a brown ribbon of road. Those hot green mountains were breeding grounds for the malarial mosquito; malignant malaria, which is fatal, was another hazard of the road journey. We landed at Kunming at five-thirty in the afternoon dark, a city shrouded in smoke and lit by fires.

I had been in Finnish cities during bombing attacks, and Madrid was swept almost daily by artillery fire; but Kunming was in a class by itself. It was a big walled city, entered by a great carved painted gate. The houses were made of timber or mud brick, with curving eaves. The Japanese claimed to have destroyed it but, as they destroyed, the Chinese residents repaired. Endurance was the Chinese secret weapon. The Japanese should have understood that, and everybody else had better remember it.

First, we smelled smoke and the stink of burst drains. Electric light lines were down like snakes over heaps of rubble. On the sides of a fresh crater, twenty-five feet wide, a little house half tottered, half held, and the family was eating inside by candle light. There was no sound except hammering. Enormous crowds of silent people were putting their houses together as best they could, by the light of candles and kerosene lamps. Something had gone wrong with the fire hose, water could not be pumped from the river. Two tall fires blazed while a mile-long chain of Chinese passed buckets of water from hand to hand. No one was wailing or crying; everyone, even small children, worked in silence.

Part of the city was still lit by electric light. Noisy eaters were bowed over rice bowls in an eating house. A long queue stood outside a movie theatre waiting to see a film called “Kentucky.” We took rickshaws to the hotel since we couldn’t find our way on foot over the rubble and around the new craters. The hotel was a small dirty café downstairs and a few dirty little rooms upstairs. The Greek owner welcomed Roy as a friend, and was in splendid form. Every day that his hotel escaped intact was like a special favour from God. He said,
“L’alerte est très correcte ici.”
The people had two to three hours warning so they could run from the city. Pre-alarm was one balloon, floating over the town; then two balloons were floated and the siren wailed, really time to get moving. For the final urgent alert the balloons were hauled down and the siren wailed steadily. The only casualties were people who got sick and tired of running off into the fields every day, and stayed and took their chances.

The penalty for looting was death. “They shot about 400 and since then there has been no problem.” Today had been unusual, only forty minutes’ warning and the Japanese, whom the Greek called
“ces bandits,”
were late. Kunming was defenceless and the Burma Road traffic did not pile up there. Roy thought the Japanese used Kunming as safe practice in bombing and cross-country navigation for their trainee pilots. We dined on fried eggs and warm beer, very jolly, and went early to bed as we had to be off before dawn and well lost, flying low between the mountains, before the Japanese came back on their usual morning raid.

Landing at Hongkong the third night was as impressive as the rest of the trip. We had been flying in what looked like bechamel sauce for hours; Hongkong was invisible but the Peak is always there as a threat for straying planes. Roy wheeled and turned, wheeled and turned, saw the field for an instant through a rift in the clouds, dropped lower, still on that circular flight pattern, saw more, and finally we skimmed the house-tops, ceiling two hundred metres, and landed neatly. The Chinese passengers had a tendency to clap, with tears in their eyes, at every safe arrival.

There can have been nothing else like CNAC in the history of civil aviation. I doubt if there were ever any other pilots like those. They flew by compass, eyesight and experience; help from the ground was limited to contact when nearing cities, the all-clear signal for take-off, and whatever weather reports they could pick from the air. I remember one weather report: “The moon is beaming,” not really much help. The pilots earned one thousand dollars a month for eighty-five flying hours and ten dollars for each extra hour. Men do not risk their lives every week for such money. They were immensely proud of their fantastic little airline. And I think they were in love with their kind of flying, the man and the machine off on their own against the Japanese and the weather and the mountains and the landing fields.

That was not a horror journey, never a dull moment. Glowing with adrenalin and high spirits, I would gladly have started again on the next flight.

U.C. had finished a long piece of work before we left the U.S. and if I hadn’t coaxed him to China, he would have been loafing somewhere probably with a fishing rod. Since he was done out of that, he loafed around Hongkong with an ever-growing band of buddies. He had learned to speak coolie English, a language related to West African pidgin and Caribbean English, and was seen laughing with waiters and rickshaw coolies and street vendors, all parties evidently enjoying each other. He loved Chinese food and would return from feasts with his Chinese crook-type friends swearing they’d been served by geisha girls, and describe the menu until I begged him to stop, due to queasiness. He was ready to try anything, including snake wine, the snakes presumably coiled and pickled in the bottom of the jug.

Local customs charmed him, for instance ear-cleaning. Salesmen with trays of thin sticks, topped by tiny coloured pom-poms, roamed the streets; these sticks were ear cleaners. Customers would pause, in the middle of those bustling crowds, to prod away at their ears with the detached expression, U.C. said, of people peeing in a swimming pool. The Chinese passion for firecrackers also delighted him. U.C. bought them every day and was very disappointed when I insisted that he stop lighting them in our rooms, where they raced like exploding worms over the floor. He found someone to box with and went to the races, saying that dye sweated off the horses and cunning Oriental fraud prevailed. From the first he was much better at the glamorous East than I was, flexible and undismayed.

U.C. wrote to my mother of the Hongkong pleasures so far, adding that “M. is very happy, treating the men like brothers and the women like dogs.” U.C. was not the most accurate fellow on earth (neither am I) and I cannot think of any women whom I could have treated like dogs. I remember only Emily Hahn with cigar and highly savvy on the Orient and I was never foolish enough to be disdainful of her, and Madame Sun Yat Sen, tiny and adorable and admirable unlike her sisters Madame Chiang and Madame Kung who were the limit. The CNAC men and their wives were my chosen companions.

I wasn’t entirely happy either as I was taking the pulse of the nation and growing more despondent by the day. Opium dens, brothels, dance halls, mah-jong parlours, markets, factories, the Criminal Courts; it was my usual way of looking at a society from the bottom rather than from the top. An opium den, to an old student of Fu Manchu, should have been velvet and gilt and voluptuous sin; these sad little rooms—more like a corridor than a room—with three tiers of bare board shelf-size bunks, were where the coolies smoked opium at ten cents for three tiny pills, because opium was cheaper than food, took away the appetite, and rested the strained and tired muscles. In one such room, behind a basket factory, a girl of fourteen fixed the pipes and when not so occupied played gently with a pet tortoise. Another such den (what a word) was an airless hole behind a carpenter’s shop; the carpenters worked from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., then ate their one daily meal and worked again from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. A girl of fifteen earned seventy cents a day there; the poor skinny smokers could fondle her as part of the services. Next door, two families lived in a space about the size of a double Pullman berth.

The Chinese, great gamblers, paid one cent an hour to play in a mah-jong parlour and bet ten cents a game; they played in concentrated silence. The streets were full of pavement sleepers at night. The brothels were small square wood cubicles, lining a narrow passage; two dollars a night per man per girl. The crimes were street vending without a licence, and a fine no one could pay. These people were the real Hongkong and this was the most cruel poverty, worse than any I had seen before. Worse still because of an air of eternity; life had always been like this, always would be. The sheer numbers, the density of bodies, horrified me. There was no space to breathe, these crushed millions were stifling each other.

When finally I visited a dank ill-lit basement factory where small children carved ivory balls within balls, a favourite tourist trinket, I could not bear to see any more. I had a mild fit of hysterics.

“They look about ten years old,” I shouted at U.C. “It takes three months to make one of those damned things, I think it’s eight balls within balls. They’ll be blind before they’re twenty. And that little girl with her tortoise. We’re all living on slave labour! The people are half-starved! I want to get out, I can’t stand this place!”